>> Male Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hey everybody, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special presentation on theCUBE. Infinidat is a company that we've been following since it's early days. A hot storage company, growing like crazy, doing things differently than most storage companies. We've basically been doubling revenues every year for quite some time now. And Brian Carmody is here to help me kick off this announcement and the presentation tonight. Brian, thanks for coming back on. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. >> So you may notice, we have a crowd chat going on live, it's crowdchat.net/infinichat, you can ask any question you want, it's an ask-me-anything chat about this announcement. This is a bi-coastal program that we're running today between here and our offices in Palo Alto. So, Brian, let's get into it, give us the update on Infinidat. >> Things are going very well at Infinidat. We're just coming out of our 17th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, so we have a healthy, sustainable, profitable business. We have happy, loyal customers. 71% of our revenue in 2017 came from existing customers that were increasing their investment in our technologies, we're delighted by that. And we have surpassed three exabytes of customer deployments. So, things are wonderful. >> And you've done this, essentially, as a one product company, is that correct? >> Yeah, so going back to our first saddle in the summer of 2013, that growth has been on the back of a single product, InfiniBox, targeted at primary storage. >> Okay, so what's inside of InfiniBox? Tell me about some of the innovations. And speaking to some of your customers, and I've spoken to a number of them, they tell me one of the things they like is that from early on, I think serial number 0001, they can take advantage of any innovations that you produce within that product, is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, InfiniBox is a software product. It has dumb hardware, dumb commodity hardware and it has very smart, intelligent software. And this allows us to, kind of, break from this forklift upgrade model and move to a model where the product gets better over time. So, if you look at the history of InifiniBox, going back to the beginning, with each successive release of our software, latency goes down, new features are added, and capacity increases become available. And this is, ya know, the difference between a software versus a hardware based innovation model. >> One of the interesting things I'll note about Infinidat is, ya know, you guys, you're doing software defined, you don't really use that terminology, ya know, it's the buzzword of the industry. The other buzzword is artificial intelligence, machine learning. You're actually using machine intelligence, you have talked about this before, to optimize the placement of data that allows you to use much less expensive media than some of the other guys and deliver more value to customers. Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. And, by the way, the reason why that is, is because we're an engineering company, not a marketing company, so we prefer just doing things rather than talking about them, but, so, InfiniBox is the first expression of a set of fundamental technologies, of our technology platform. And the first piece of that is what you're talking about, it's called neurocache, and it's our ML and AI infrastructure for learning customer workloads and using that insight in real time to optimize data placement. And the end result of this is driving cost out of storage infrastructure and driving up performance. That's the first piece, that's neurocache. The second piece of our technology foundations is InfiniSnap. So, this is our snapshot mechanism that allows infinite lock-free copy data management with absolutely no performance impact. So, that's the second. And then the third, is InfiniRaid and our RAS platform. So, this is our distributed raid architecture that allows us to have multi-petabyte scale, extremely high durability, but also have extremely high availability of the services. And that's what enables our seven nines reliability guarantee. Those things together are the basis of our products. >> Okay, so, sort of, we're here today and now what's exciting is you're expanding beyond just a one product company into a portfolio of products. So, sort of, take us through what you're announcing today. >> Yeah, so this is a really exciting day and it's a milestone for Infinidat because InfiniBox now has some brothers and sisters in the family. The first thing that we are announcing is a new F series InfiniBox model, which we call F-6212. So, this is the same feature set, it's the same software, it's the same everything as it's smaller InfiniBox models, but it is extremely high capacity, it's our largest InfiniBox, it's 8.3 petabytes of capacity in that same F-6000 form factor. So, that's number one. Number two, we're announcing a product called InfiniGuard. InfiniGuard is petabyte scale data protection with lightning fast restores. The third thing that we're announcing is a new product called InfiniSync. InfiniSync is a revolutionary business continuity appliance that allows synchronous RPO-0 replication over infinite distances. It's the first ever in this category. And then, the fourth and final thing that we're announcing is a product called NutrixCloud. NutrixCloud is sovereign storage, but enables real-time competition between public cloud providers. The ultimate in agility, which is the ability to go poly-cloud. And that's the content of the portfolio announcement. >> Excellent, okay, great. Thanks Brian, for helping us set that up. The program today, as I say, there's a crowd chat going on, crowdchat.net/infinichat, ask any question that you want. We're going to cover other's announcements today. InfiniSync is the next segment that's up. Dr. Rico is here, we're going to do a quick switch, and I'll be interviewing doc. And then we're going to kick it over to our studio in Palo Alto to talk about InfiniGuard, which is, essentially, what was happening is Infinidat customers were using InfiniBox as a backup target and then asked Infinidat, "Hey, can you actually make this a product "and start partnering with software companies, "backup software companies and, you know, "making it a robust, you know, backup "and recovery solution?" And then multi-cloud is, you know, one of the hottest topics going. Really interested to hear more about that. And then we're going to bring on Eric Burgener from IDC to get the analyst perspective, that's also going to be in the west coast. And then Brian and I are going to come back and wrap up. And then we're going to dive into the crowd chat, so keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with Dr. Rico, right after the short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by vmware and it's ecosystem partner. (techno beat) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCube. Happy to welcome back to the program two guests we've had on a few times. Randy Arseneau, who's the CMO of Inifindat, and Bryan Carmody who's the CTO at Inifinidat. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, Stu, what's going on? >> Thanks, Stu, good to be here. >> Alright, so, it's Vmworld time again, a lot going on. We set, kind of a vibe of the show already. It's about the same attendance as last year, but the vibe feels good. Pat is actually hitting the stride on the keynote, talking about Amazon, talking about momentum that they have. You guys have had some announcements recently. Randy, why don't you start us off. Tell us about, you know, the update of Inifinidat, how many customers you've got, what can you share? >> So, thanks, Stu, thanks for having us again, it's great to, great to be back on theCube. So, yeah, we've, over the last few years, three and a half years that we've been shipping our product, we've been able to sustain a really good, consistent cadence of growth, and that's continued into this year. So, a few weeks ago, a couple weeks ago, we announced our most recent performance, financial performance. We're continuing to more than double each quarter year over year. We are profitable from a gap revenue perspective, which is kind of unheard of in our industry, so we think we're breaking the trend of a lot of the storage startups, and even some established storage players that are having a really difficult time making their financial and business model and go to market work. Ours is clearly working, we're generating revenue, we're growing our customer base. We now have over two exabytes of storage in service world wide. We figured out about 80-ish, 80 percent, plus or minus a couple of percentage points of that is running vmware. So, we think this is kind of an obvious place for us to be in terms of the affinities of our customer base. And about 50 percent of our systems are actually dedicated to vmware, so they're running huge vmware farms. So, the financial performance has continued to be really solid, we're bucking the trend in the industry in terms of being profitable, and continuing to grow the business at a really aggressive rate. Because the solution works, I mean it's not rocket science, right, we have a product. >> I hear you have trouble raising money if you're profitable, so that's challenging. Yeah, and congratulations on the momentum. The joke a few years ago have been Vmworld became storage world, and you know, we spent years talking about, oh it's, you know flash is there, and then the software to find data center. The only mention of like, storage that I really heard in the keynote this morning was Pat talking about "Oh, they've got about 10,000 customers running vsand." So, Bryan, a lot of waves going on, we've had a number of conversations about where you fit, bring us up to speed as to, you know, what are the conversations you're having with customers, you know, what are the important trends to them, and where your technology, how do you position yourselves there? >> Oh, sure, so I mean, I think from customers perspectives it's all just storage, they're all data stores, and the different architectures, and the different delivery models are, they don't really matter at the end of the day. What your CIO, which he cares about, is what is the acquisition cost, what's the operational cost? What's the performance that it delivers, the latency in through put? And what's the availability of the data store? And, you know, what we're seeing, especially with the software defined storage systems, and vsands, is they work, but they work for small capacities, when you try to scale them, what every customer, without exception, sees is that they add three dollars in server cost for every dollar in storage array cost avoidance. So, you know, these projects tend to not be very, they tend to be career limiting, you know, and that's why what we're hearing, especially at Wall Street, is that it's vscam, not vsand. >> Stu: Wow. >> Yeah, but for small workloads where, and environments where you're looking to get a, you have a single person who needs to do storage, and manage the hyper visors, it absolutely works. I think it's a, it's a killer robome and small business solution. >> Yeah, it's interesting, cos there's this growth of solutions that use storage, but they aren't in a position to storage, and vsands, and a lot of hyper conversions like that. >> I like the virtualization admin, I've got some app, I just want a management, I don't have to want a, you know, God, that storage stuff's hard. You know, so they'll kind of do that pieces, versus, you know, real storage, you know, like care about reliability. >> Go ask Pat what the average size of those customers are. Like, my grandmother is one of those customers, you know, she uses it. But, yeah, so I >> You come from a heavy technology family, though, so. >> Yes, exactly. She was the first vm certified person I probably know. So, clearly the part of the market that we're going after is very different from that. Our systems start at, well they get interesting at a petabyte of usable capacity. By far our most popular model is a petabyte and a half of effective capacity. Our largest system scales up to ten petabytes in a single system manage, in a single rack. So, these are big monster cloud scale vmware environments. That's where, you know, our customers are having awesome success. And you know, it's not just limited to vmware, though. You know, you can take the same system, the same skew, and you can use it to replace data domain systems for backup to disc. The largest splunk insulation in the world is running at one of the US, big US telecoms and is running the same skew that our customers are using for their big petabyte scale vmware environments. Analytics, which is probably the biggest growing thing, one area that Randy is working pretty heavily in, it's absolutely exploding. >> Yeah, it's, which is cool in a sense, because we've been, you know, and I kind of use the tongue in cheek term "accidental tourists." I mean, we sell this system into an incredibly wide range of workload environments, and enterprise environments. Which is why we have a really strong presence in every vertical, I mean we're strong in health care and life sciences, we're strong in financial services, we're strong in retail and manufacturing, we're strong in utilities, we're strong in cloud providers. And it's exactly because of the fact that the system is designed and architected expressly to be very flexible and very adaptable. So, we never shy away from the concept of general purpose storage, I mean that became very unfashionable about five or six years ago, when everything had to be hyper-specialized and fit for purpose. But, when we can walk into an environment, and as Bryan said, most of our customers tend to be fairly, you know, midsize and large enterprises, they don't have one particular type or class of workload, they've got 100. And they're running 100 different storage systems. So we can go in as a consolidation play and say "Look, let's take all of that vmware environment, all of that, you know, take your data domain and your backup protection environment, your analytic workload environments, and move them off of these disparate platforms onto this one, you know, very capable, very flexible system. They all peacefully coexist, they all perform phenomenally well. It's immensely easy. We have a customer presentation that's going to be talking about exactly how easy it is. We have another Cube session where another one of our customers is going to share the beauty of integration and orchestration automation using our API. So, we kind of have a large enterprise class, extremely flexible, fully composable storage system that you can really plugin anywhere. I mean, we've talked before about how in some environments, there might be one or two little fringe applications somewhere that require some weird configuration of flash, or you know, in memory database or something that's five terabytes, that's running on some strange system, and that's fine, like, we're happy to leave that there. We will go after the other 95 percent of the workloads in your environments and we'll take them all, and do so very happily. >> Yeah, it's interesting, we tracked kind of that wave of big data, and especially like hadoop, and I went to all of these shows and they'd be like "Oh, you know, hgfs, you know, don't put it on a storage array because it's too expensive!" And when you dug into it, it was, you know, a couple of servers sitting under somebody's desk. >> Right. >> So, it wasn't real storage, like you said, but it was cost, and it was there, but what I'm excited about is when I'm hearing about the new kind of analytics things. When you start talking about, you know, AI and machine learning, and everything like that, you've got to have, you've got real storage issues, and how are you attacking the price, and how are you architecting to be ready for those types of applications? >> Yeah, and to Bryan's point the telecoms we've got the one running the largest splunk environment of the world, we've got another that's running a huge elk environment, the architect presented at elasticon this year, that's all running on Inifinibox. So, again, we haven't specifically architected the solution necessarily for those, but our customers, you know, God bless 'em, bring it in, plug it in, try it, because it's so simple, there's really no downside to experimenting with it, and they discover "Wow, this actually works exceptionally well." >> Yeah, and I think if, if you kind of step back from specific workloads, analytics or vmware, or whatever, what customers for the next decade are asking for is pretty consistent. And it's pretty easy to understand. They want to be able to do sub-millisecond response times. They want to do very high multi-gigabyte per second, throughput. They want to do it over petabyte scale datacents, and they want to do it at a vastly lower cost per gigabyte than the kind of traditional enterprise storage products. And if you build that, they will come. And I think that's what we did, and I think it's a huge part of, you know, the success that our customers are having. And the momentum that kind of our company has right now, is just doing all of those things simultaneously. >> Alright, so, from a price standpoint, I mean, price and simplicity, kind of been the things that we've been beaten on for the storage industry. You know, what, how do you position that, you know, what is kind of the killer, you know, thing that makes the customers come to you and say, you know, "Wow, you guys are different and that's going to solve." >> You know, so, we unabashedly, in every business school, you know, whatever, they tell you "Don't sell on price, sell on value," and we have kind of been doing the opposite of that. Since day one, since day one. The first communication to a potential customer is we put a number out there. That number will be a tenth, on a cost per gig basis, of, you know, of what they're paying today. And it's a, it's something that nobody can say no to, it's a demonstration that we're really serious about what we're capable of doing. So, then that only works if you back it up, then, when the customer does an evaluation, and the bake offs, and the competitive stuff. You have to absolutely destroy everything else out there, or else you get pigeonholed as a tier two, a tier three. And I think a lot of the, a lot of the newer companies are kind of falling into that, where they're, they have traction, but they're really not getting into enterprise accounts, they're not getting life safety and mission critical workloads put on them. So, we unabashedly lead with price, and, you know, at the end of the day, every time you instantiate a cost function reduction, in storage, it makes new types of computing possible. You put that storage in the hands of developers, and they tell their management teams "Here's what we can do with this." We are trying to make storage less expensive. >> Yeah, and although, you know, you're not supposed to sell on price, you sell on value, the problem is nobody buys on value, so you still have to be price sensitive. And you have to have a solution that is economically feasible, and viable, and attractive. So, we've got a very, very attractive TCO structure and model that we've used in just about every of our major sales campaigns. And we have to monstroubly, significantly lower cost, not just of acquisition, but of ongoing operation. So, when you layer all those things together, you can sell to the pure technologists who love the kind of robustness and the feature richness of the capability, and where they can apply it, and how they can apply it, but it also has a very attractive financial story, so when you're selling it to the business owners and the kind of, you know, other constituencies, it's a story that everybody likes, so. >> Yeah, lot of people in the storage industry, it's always, you know, that next thing, flash was a wavy road for a while, you know, when I go talk to the storage geeks, it's the "Oh, nvme over fabric." It's going to dramatically change everything. >> Bryan: It is. >> What's your take? >> Oh, yeah, yeah, it's huge, it's huge. You know, it's always a catch up game between the network and the transport technologies, and then the storage media. So, you know, nvme over fabric's is huge, but you know, you have to use it the right way, and I think that it's not being used correctly by the marketers, you know, who are running you know. A lot of the storage companies, they're using it as a way to justify their pricing. They're using it as a way to make storage expensive. And it's kind of the, again, it's the opposite of our strategy. What every customer is demanding from their vendors, is "I need my storage next quarter to be less expensive than it is, this quarter next year needs to be cheaper than this year, how are you going to do that for me?" So, advanced technologies, like, nvme and nvme over fabrics, and optane and three d crosspoint, these things all have, they're incredibly strategic technologies. But, you have to use them the right way, you have to always keep an eye on the bottom line, and be very suspicious of technologists that are trying to make infrastructure more expensive, rather than less. >> Yeah, and I mean, it's always, it's not just the technology, it's the application, and I think a lot of vendors in our space have a tendency to focus exclusively on the technology, and how to build an architecture around it, or repurpose an existing architecture, more commonly, without really thinking about the application of that technology. Where is it going to be used, how is it going to be used, what's the cost structure have to look like, what's the use-case environment look like, what verticals am I going to sell it to, what's the channel ecosystem look like? They kind of tend to save that for the last, so they develop this whiz bang, you know, solution, which is again, typically, an aging architecture that maybe has some new foundational layers of technology or media built into it, without really thinking about the end game. So, that's one of the many things that I think Moshe Yanai does better than anybody, is he looks at the problem from the outside in. He meets with customers on a daily basis, I mean, he's kind of a maniac in terms of traveling around and meeting with customers. He has a phenomenal reputation, for obvious reasons, and he listens. He listens to their problems, he listens to what they confront and what they fight with every day, to kind of make a solution that works for them, and then he adapts that to his design ethos. Not, it's not the other way around. So, we don't develop something and then go try to force fit it into a market or into an environment. >> Yeah, last thing I wanted to ask you is; users coming to a show like this, they love to be able to hear from their peers, you've got a whole bunch of customers telling their stories, what are some of the key takeaways that, you know, peers talking to peers, that they're going to be hearing this week at the show? >> Yeah, so, there's, it's a lot of the same things we've been talking about here, you know. It's cost takeout, frankly, I mean, first and foremost, these are customers that are under tremendous cost pressure. They have used us as a consolidation platform to take costs out, but deliver a higher quality of service. We have, so we have a breakfast we organize, we've got a bunch of our customers. The other thing I love about our customers is they have a tendency to be kind of groupies, and I use that term you know, very favorably, because they're immensely loyal to the system, because it simply makes their life better and easier and allows them to focus on other tasks. So, they're talking about cost reduction and consolidation, they're talking about delivering higher performance. Very, very simply, they're talking about the ease of integration and orchestration and automation using our API. So, plugging our system in and just, it becomes a magnet for workloads. They bring it in for a particular project, and as other growth occurs, in insularly areas, it just gets moved on to the infinibox because it's incredibly easy, and it's a painless, seamless, frictionless process, so. >> Bryan, I'm going to give you a final word, takeaways for the show that you want people to have from Infinidat. >> Oh, I just, I really want everybody to have a great time, come by, check out the booth, we have an espresso machine, we'll talk a little bit about some of the computer science behind the system, and, but more than anything, I want everybody to have a really good time at the event. >> Well, great point, everybody, Vmworld, always a great community, lots of great conversations, everybody geeking out on the technology, and getting some caffeine to help them through what is a very long week. So, we're at the beginning of three days of live coverage here, double set. Thank you, Randy Arseneau, Bryan Carmody. >> Thanks, Stu, if you chroma key my shirt, just be gentle, that's all I ask, thank you. >> Alright, we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCube. (techno music)